Category: LIFESTYLE

~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

Adventures in Santa Fe Livingness.

GROWING UP IN LOS ANGELES,  under the umbrella of powerful, wealthy, and stylish wings.  Women were models and men were moguls.   A lot of wealth came overnight in the film business – some  it took years to acquire,  but mostly it was a time to spread your wings and ride life. Polo matches, speeding yachts in the Marina,  horseback riding in Bel Air, movie premieres, and nightclubs.  By the time this congregation was in their fifties  the wick of life had waxed over, and a new generation was born to carve  their statutes.  That is the billboard  that I didn’t like, resisted, rebelled against, and scrutinized.  At twenty it was easy to jump ship by enrolling in Sonoma  State College and transforming.  My thirties were  career driven and at forty I saddled up for rebellion.  It jumped out of the birthday cake and sent me on  a jolly ride. Here now, at 60ish, a reversal of rebellion has popped up;   I want to walk a panoptic view.   phone-pics-291.png

Living in Santa Fe has forged a masters thesis on reinventing my rhythm, opinions, tolerance, affinity, and creativity.  That is why I’ve been stationed here for nine years;  it has taken that long to strip down the prongs of my LA umbrella.   If only I could homogenize both parts, but it always feels like oil and water. I’m a city gal and a villager. That word balance bounces up a lot. I find it an abstraction that I cannot untangle.  Oh well, there is always the surprise of life, the moment when you go down the drain and then a hand reaches out and places you on a new path.

A MEMOIR HAS TO END book 2

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The sunlight shatters the curtain-less bedroom window and burns into my eyes at daybreak. From this unsheltered spot I rise to see a pot of blue sky over the rooftops, and the expectant afternoon showers building up in the clouds. The sky is filled with crows, eagles, and magpies lingering overhead weightless and free-falling, beyond all of us caught behind electronics. The days  filled with desert showers that drench the soil and turn the arid dry land green and lush. For this I am thankful.  At the end of the day, I am inclined to sit in the courtyard and watch the sky manifest colors unmatched by any Dunn Edwards collection. By the time dinner is topical, I have substituted preparing food, to just snacking, This August underscores the need to sit down, to sort of bob my head to Nancy Wilson music, and do very little. I’m self publishing Cradle of Crime- My Father, Me, and the Mob.  images

CRADLE OF CRIME- SYNOPSIS

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The memoir began as a compass to my father’s secret and disreputable criminal history. It pointed to a young girl whose survival was wedged between shameless love and immobilizing fear of her father.DAD IN WING TIPS

As Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s best friend and business partner from 1937 until his death in 1947, Dad acclaimed Ben Siegel. “He was the best friend I ever had.”

Dad sat inches from Ben the night he was murdered. Why did he survive? He ducked!  After convincing Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello he would not accept  immunity from deportation, and five counts of   claiming false citizenship, the Mob honored and protected him.

Faced with an identity meltdown ten years after Dad died I implored his friends, associates, historians, the Freedom of Information & Privacy Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Services,  and the Archives of the Department of Justice, to build the branches of my family tree. Along this irreversible journey I suffered disgrace, rage, and Dad’s ghostly disapproval as I delved into the FBI files and discovered the family secrets. Most startling was not his gambling addiction, criminal activities, or imprisonment.  I learned my father’s attempt at reformation was thwarted by the FBI.  A  vendetta  by Hoover for not cooperating as an informant. I  expose what I’ve learned because I’ve made the family history mine.

Incorporated within stories of discovery are government surveillance records, newspaper articles, court testimony, and criminal activities that defamed his reputation and our family. As the discoveries occur the reader is taken inside the transformation of my identity.  Once liberated from Dad’s paranormal disapproval of my investigation, the book was written.

This is a startling, yet inspirational look inside the struggle of a gangster’s daughter to understand her father’s allegiance to the Mob.


CLOVER CLUB-HOLLYWOOD

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The Clover Club

via 8477 Sunset Blvd. — J. H. Graham

Mr. Copacabana – Book Review — The Book Review Directory

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The subtitle of Mr Copacabana – An American History by Night– is peculiarly apt for this biography of the author’s father, Monte Proser. Monte, it seems, was born with the cultural history of the United States locked into his DNA. His life was lived literally and metaphorically in the nighttime world of nightclubs, addiction, […]

via Mr. Copacabana – Book Review — The Book Review Directory

EDITING LIFE

~ LouLou ~ 3 Comments

There are  reasons to quit and more reasons not to. The one reason that hovers above all is that everything we do in life needs revision. We are never through evolving into more thoughtful, loving, or wise human beings. Every day there is an opportunity to  revise your valor and conviction.

Revising the position you sit, walk, talk, judge, form opinions, contribute to your home, friends, partners, and discovering what you’ve learned,  dreamed, and mastered, is your novel.   How to write a chapter when you feel  caught;  trapped by decisions that are outdated. Antiquities of a former persona.

Changes in life are like  photographic images.  Looking at old photographs and what I see is someone else. Some are recalled with approval and others are works that led me astray.  I’m not alone. Life is a runaway that we have to catch for ourselves. 

The puzzle is how to live, where to live, and for whom.  It is the same with  manuscripts; they improve with each revision. 

 

SINGLES

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All of them.  I mean all ages, classes, genders, and sexes.  Single people must  be brave; they do not have a partner to hold on to when THE LIGHTS GO OUT.   The eye of the United States Government knows  we are single.  Why are we not included in your speeches, legislation, and laws?330px-WLANL_-_MicheleLovesArt_-_Museum_Boijmans_Van_Beuningen_-_Eva_na_de_zondeval,_Rodin?

TRIPPING ON TAOS, NEW MEXICO

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1998 WAS ALL RIGHT

AWAKENING ON THE ROADRUNNER SHUTTLE as we chugged up the steep grade highway, the red skin of Taos peeled back the imposing medieval Gorge crack. The cavity unzipped and five thousand feet below was the Rio Grande. I felt the altitude filling my lungs, and my eyes twitching from one scenic masterpiece to another. Everyone in the shuttle was giving me a history lesson about Taos. Before I knew it, the shuttle door opened, and the driver yelled, ‘Smiley.”

At the end of a two-mile dirt road the shuttle dropped me off and I was shouldered on either side by melting banks of snow.  It was April. Unexpected snow storms arrived the same week.

The FBI boxes I’d shipped were in front of my casita.  Darting from room to room, thoroughly satisfied with a two-story loft, floor-to-ceiling windows, and sunlight in all the right spots. I unpacked in the sedated silence. Was I all alone out here?  A few other casitas were on the property, but they looked vacant. A pang of anxiety seized and then I realized, I had a cell phone, a credit card, and cash. I could always call a cab right.  It was winter in April; the first time I’d lived in falling

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DH. LAWRENCE WRITING ROOM. TAOS.

snow.  In the dining room, I unpacked the boxes and arranged them in a circle around the table. It was a heavy southwestern oak table, twelve feet long, and to the right were sliding glass doors that let the light stream across the black-and-white print. I was left to unravel two thousand more pages on Dad’s criminal life.

The trip was extended to two months. I read all the files and left Taos a different woman. I came back, persuaded Rudy to come visit, and he was hooked within minutes. He bought the Live Work Studio and fulfilled my dream of opening a  Gallery of Black & White Photography of our 60s Rock & Roll legends.. One of Lou Reed shooting up heroin.

OPEN THE DOOR!

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The world we are living is not familiar; everyday it erupts with an inconceivable corruption, acts of violence, and viciousness against humanity. It’s not the Italian roast coffee that wakes me up, it’s world news.  I feel less and less a part of humanity and more like a wild creature chewing on an old bone.  My outlook on social clubs, synagogue and church congregations, membership clubs, group classes, and let’s meet up organizing makes a lot of sense now. Especially if you don’t have children or a life mate. The temptation to retreat into a decorous  world of fantasy is irresistible.  Experience taught me that losing it, giving up, hugging the pillow with film noir on the screen will revive me. It may take two days or more, the freedom to indulge in the absurdity, tragedy, and comedy of life is available to me.  I am fortunate that all those years studying real estate, listening and proving myself by placing money in the bosses pocket, trickled into my life.  For my Gen-X and Millennium pals I say this; buy a duplex somewhere you may want to live that is not crowded yet!

It’s a great big wide wide world if you leave the doors open. I’m feeling  really happy and if I CAN DO IT SO CAN YOU. 

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~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

Santa Fe today

Santa Fe today, Friday the 13th. Listening to soundtrack of Man & a Woman, my lyrics, my movie. The end is what I imagine mine. The day was blowing cottonwood  and white wisteria  in a blow glow of dance.  There is a certainty about my movements, different than yesterday. I declare this day of summer, sandals,pedicure, trying on my bathing suit, making a palette change, and putting on the ritz. The gloss and bronze, and maybe even going outdoors.  Shopping and going to the Lowriders Day in Santa Fe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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FLOOR IT

~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

If we experience disappointment our inner oars, the ones that carry us over the tidal waves, must be accessible, we must pick them up and bash the waves.  If you are at a red light in life-like me, get a tune-up and then floor it!

 

ISADORA DUNCAN
ISADORA DUNCAN

MOVING WITH MILES

~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

Listening to Miles I imagine my pen moving on paper in straight lines and indentations. The beak of the pen breaks out of its shell and abstractions of thought spill. Without prior meditation, feelings form the thoughts. Emotion versus reasoning. Miles musical pen is all emotion. That’s Jazz music!

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